Hancock signs up for AI help

Insurance giant John Hancock and a small Boston startup are teaming up in the hopes of using artificial intelligence to guide the company’s investment decisions. John Hancock — and its Canadian parent company Manulife — have started working with indico data solutions, a startup that makes AI software designed to create easily digestible trends, themes and other important information out of the mountains of data that financial analysts have to keep track of. “These guys are all drowning in data,” said Vishal Daga, chief customer officer for indico. “The idea is to build an application using these deep learning techniques that can help analysts whittle down that stack of reading material in a useful manner.” Indico’s software can analyze word choices from stock analyst reports and automatically detect whether the…